Kay's Memories
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Set after 'Return of the Creature', one of the original cast remembers the Gill-Man.


I don't own Creature from the Black Lagoon. I just own this.

Please let me know what you think of my first little foray into this franchise.

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Kay's Memories.

She had known from the moment they had left the region the Black Lagoon was located in that it would only be a matter of time before the Gill-Man popped up again in her mind. But in the meantime, she had tried hard to bury the memories she had of that amazing, terrifying creature.

But that hadn't stopped the nightmares that continued to haunt her. One of her worst nightmares was the blend between talking to Dr Thompson and then the Gill-Man's terrible gurgling screech as it grabbed hold of his face, threatening to tear his skin to shreds. What made that particular nightmare terrifying was it took place at night, just like it had in reality when they'd managed to drug the Gill-Man sufficiently to place it in an improvised cage onboard the Rita.

But the nightmare she had was she hadn't thrown a lantern at the head of the Gill-Man instead, it had simply killed Dr Thompson while she had been too terrified to move or even scream, and it dragged her under the surface of the lagoon.

Kay shook off the shiver she felt as she remembered the nightmare, and glared at the newspaper that lay on her lap. She had been out of the country for a while, so she hadn't heard the latest news, and that included radio and TV. She had a long-standing subscription to the local newspapers to deliver the papers to her home whenever she was on an expedition.

What she had read shook her to the core.

The Gill-Man had been taken from the Amazon all the way to an aquarium in Florida. Later the creature had escaped, killing the keeper responsible for its welfare, and it disappeared into the ocean. Later it began stalking a young woman, an ichthyologist called Helen Dobson. It later abducted her from a seaside restaurant where a party was going on. Helen was later rescued, but the creature was shot by the police. Kay doubted the Gill-Man was dead - David and Carl had thought they had killed it before they had left the Lagoon, after all, but they had seen that the Gill-Man was strong enough to resist a drug that made other fish float to the surface.

Kay sighed as she read the newspapers for what seemed like the tenth time and wondered if the Gill-Man would ever be left alone. She closed her eyes, thinking…. She could understand why the Gill-Man had stalked this Helen Dobson, just like it had stalked her so long ago when she, David, Mark and Carl had travelled to the Black Lagoon in search of fossilised remains. The Gill-Man was lonely. Who knew how long it had lived in that part of the Amazon? Did it once have a family, and if so what had happened to them?

But the simple reason it had been lonely for god knew how long did not excuse its actions, she could still remember the dead bodies that cropped up in its wake, and she remembered the savage way the Gill-Man had almost torn Dr Thompson's face to pieces. She could understand desperation, but every time they had tried to escape on the Rita, the creature refused to let them go.

Kay wondered what the Gill-Man was doing right now, wondering if it was still alive….. part of her hoped it was still alive even after being dragged from its home in the Amazon river and taken all the way to Florida. She understood why science wanted the Gill-Man; it was a humanoid creature, it had a body suited for life underwater, with webbed feet and hands, it could breathe underwater and it probably had abilities they hadn't even seen yet.

She remembered how she had talked to David and Carl after their ordeal in the Amazon. When the expedition was arranged to track the rest of the fossil after that hand had been discovered, David had lectured an entire hall of people, including herself, about how humans had just gone into space and they might need to find a way to adapt their bodies by studying fish and other aquatic species.

David probably wasn't the only person to think that way. There were probably dozens of scientists who had spent a lot of time working out the best way of making humans live in space without any ill effects, and they had turned to the underwater world for inspiration. Fish were too far separated from humans, but the Gill-Man was similar enough to humans for scientists to learn how to do it properly.

Kay frowned as she remembered how their encounter with the Gill-Man had virtually torn the somewhat shaky relationship Mark and David shared, a rivalry that she had been in the middle of, much to her chagrin. Mark had been a good man, she knew that, but she had found his growing obsession when they had been trapped in the lagoon tiresome. He had treated the whole expedition as a hunting trip, and his desire for fame had become even more transparent as their fight to get out of the lagoon went on.

But just because he had been mad didn't mean he hadn't been a good man at heart, and she hated what happened to him.

Kay pushed those memories aside, memories of what had started out as another seemingly easy expedition to locate fossils before they had turned into a nightmare. She cursed the idiots who'd kidnapped the Gill-Man from his lagoon and taken him to Florida where they poked and prodded him in a series of experiments to get an idea of how intelligent he was, underestimating just how dangerous he could be.

She wondered if the Gill-Man was still alive, she hoped so.

When she had encountered him, she had seen two sides to his nature which were both conflicted. On the one side, the Gill-Man was a savage, merciless killer who went after anyone who got in his way, and on the other side, he was a more sympathetic, lonely character. Besides, the Gill-Man had survived all kinds of hardships over the years - he had been drugged, kidnapped, shot, hit with a spear gun…. If he could survive any of those once, he could survive being electrocuted, forced to live in cruelly chlorinated water, and then shot again.

Kay looked out of the window, already dreading the next time she would once more hear of the Gill-Man.


End file.
